‘Did he ever talk to you about Flavia?’
‘This is the real point of my story, Lady Powerscourt. One of the things that helped to make Sir Arthur better was deciding to find out who had sent the letters. His friend from the army was very keen on it, apparently. Know your enemies, or some such rubbish, was what he used to say. And so he came to see me. He wrote beforehand, all very proper. He may have been drinking less than he had before but he still managed to down a third of a bottle of whisky in the hour he was with me. It took some time before he got round to what he wanted to say – maybe that was why the scotch was needed in such quantities. He started looking at the carpet rather than at me. Then he said that he had employed a private detective to find out about the letters.
‘This is why I have come,’ he managed to say. ‘This detective person told me that he thought Candlesby sent the letters himself, in a desperate attempt to get Flavia to leave me. I couldn’t believe it at first. Seems unlikely, what? But you knew Flavia. You were her closest friend. Did she ever talk to you about the letters?’
‘Well, what was I to say? Would I be betraying my friend if I told him the truth? Would it send him back towards despair and larger doses of scotch if I told him? I think I must have delayed so long that he could have guessed what the answer was if he had been a sensitive man. But he wasn’t. I tried to decide whether it would be better for him to know the truth, or be left in ignorance. In the end I told him the truth.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He didn’t say anything at all, not for a while. He walked up and down the room for about ten minutes. Then he headed for the front door. As he was going he said, “The man’s a bastard, a complete bastard. I’m going to kill him.”’
PART THREE
CARAVAGGIO
The bulk of the great fortunes are now in a highly liquid state. They do not consist of huge landed estates, vast parks and castles and all the rest of it.
13
Lord Francis Powerscourt was on his way to see the manager of Finch’s Bank in Boston, where the Candlesby accounts were held. The manager was not at all what he had expected. Gone were the sober suits and white shirts of the popular stereotype of bank manager. Sebastian Lambert’s suit looked as if it had come from Savile Row and the shirt and tie from one of Jermyn Street’s finest tailors. He was a round sort of bank manager, a tubby man about five feet nine inches tall with long sideburns and a neatly trimmed moustache. Every now and again he would remove his glasses and rub the lenses energetically on the bottom of his tie. He ushered Powerscourt to a seat by a table in his office, whose walls were covered with pictures of the Derby and the other great classics of the turf.
‘Never sure it’s a good idea to have these pictures on the walls,’ Lambert said. ‘People might think the bank is encouraging them to go to the races and gamble their money away. Bad for the prudent customer, bad for the Nonconformist conscience. Still, enough of this. You said in your letter, Lord Powerscourt, that you wished to discuss the financial affairs of the Candlesby family, with particular reference to the old Earl who has just been murdered rather than his successor who has also just been murdered.’
‘That is correct,’ said Powerscourt. ‘My concerns are with John, the previous Earl. I don’t think money or the lack of it had a great deal to do with his death, but knowledge of the financial situation does enable a person like me to take a more comprehensive view of the victim. Naturally, Mr Lambert, whatever you tell me will be treated in confidence.’
‘Thank you for saying that,’ said Lambert, stretching out his legs. ‘Where should I begin?’ He seemed to derive inspiration from a very close finish in a classic horse race behind Powerscourt’s head, where a grey horse was just beginning to pull ahead of a brown one.
‘Let me begin with an observation about our aristocratic friends engaged in agriculture. They are not very intelligent. One man who got out of land completely and went on to make a fortune on the Stock Exchange put it something like this: “In Year One,” my man said, “they’re all growing wheat. In the end there’s too much wheat on the market. So prices fall. The people who were into beef or dairy did well because there wasn’t enough on the market so prices went up. Now then, in Year Two,” my chap was well into his stride by now, “the farming fraternity all get out of wheat and into beef or dairy or whatever did well the year before. The same thing happens, of course. Too much beef or too much dairy means low prices. If they’d stuck to wheat they’d have made a killing, as most of their brethren had bailed out of it. Year Three, they all plunge back into wheat because of the high prices in Year Two and the same process kicks off all over again.”’
‘Did that happen to the Candlesbys? Were they numbered with the five wise virgins or the five foolish ones who brought no extra oil for their lamps?’
Sebastian Lambert laughed and rubbed his glasses vigorously on the end of his tie. ‘I’m afraid that the estate managers fare no better than their masters when it comes to working out how to make money out of farming these days. You know as well as I do, Lord Powerscourt, that the decline in agriculture has been going on for a generation or more now. Hardly anybody escapes. Lower rents, lower value for the land, imported produce from all over the world putting more downward pressure on prices – it’s a spiral that never stops. If the big farmers in these parts ask for my advice I often tell them to get out, sell up while they can, cash in their assets before they have to mortgage themselves to the hilt to pay the bills or pay the interest. The Candlesbys’ – he waved an elegant arm in a circle in front of him – ‘are in debt up to their eyeballs. The late Earl would not be told. He would insist on all the trimmings that prevailed in better times when his father was alive. Too many servants, too expensive a diet, too many fine clarets at the highest prices, too many racehorses at even higher prices in days gone by. There may be faster ways to lose money than owning racehorses, Lord Powerscourt, but I’m damned if I know what they are. There are two mortgages on the house worth over fifty thousand pounds. And remember that while the price you get for your corn may go down, the interest payments tend to remain the same. There are further loans and mortgages on various bits of the land for another forty-five thousand so the total is almost in six figures. The late Earl was thinking of taking out further mortgages to help him pay the interest on the existing ones. It’s all pretty desperate. I can’t see how they are going to get out of it, really. They might be able to sell the land and the house for more than the debts but I doubt it. There are so many families in similar situations at the present time.’
‘Does this mean’, said Powerscourt, ‘that the new Earl, should I say the new new Earl – we’re now on the second new Earl in no time at all – inherits nothing? Only mortgages and minuses on the family accounts?’
‘Correct, my lord. If your parents haven’t told you, it must come as a terrible shock when your father dies and you inherit a mountain of debts.’
Perhaps, Powerscourt thought to himself, the Candlesby financial position was such that you would want to keep the incumbent alive at all costs. Far better for them to be responsible for the debts.